Puplava: Welcome back, everyone. In 1972, three scientists from MIT created
a computer model that analyzed global resource consumption and production. The
results shocked the world and created stirring conversation about global overshoot,
or resource use beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. Now preeminent scientists
Donella Meadows, Jordan Randers and Dennis Meadows have teamed up again to update
and expand their original findings in The Limits to Growth: the Thirty-Year
Update. Joining us on the program today is Professor Meadows, and Professor,
when Limits to Growth was published in 1972, what did you say back then, and
how accurate has that been?

Meadows: In 1972, we presented the set of scenarios about the global future
that were produced by our computer model. These showed sort of the gross
features of global society out to the year 2100. On the basis of that we said
that if policies weren’t drastically changed, the global community would
overshoot its limits sometime in the early part of the twenty-first century,
and that the most probable result would be collapse. Now thirty years later,
we look back, we’ve redone the analysis and find that what we said in
’72 was essentially correct, except of course now we’ve lost thirty
years. And whereas in 1972 we were comfortably below the carrying capacity of
the globe—that is to say there was room for population and industry to
grow—now we’re significantly above.

Puplava: Well, if we take a look at the last thirty years, we’ve certainly
seen new technologies that have enabled, for example, more oil out of, let’s
say, the ground. Some areas of food and energy production have exceeded population
growth. Can we expect the same in the next thirty years? In other words, can
technology help alleviate some of these problems?

Meadows: Of course, technology has made enormous strides, and every sign is
that it will continue to change rapidly. Indeed, in our studies we in some cases
assume that technology will be able to reduce resource use, for example, by
as much as 85 or 90% over the coming century.

The key thing to know about technology is that it’s a tool. It’s
not autonomous; it doesn’t operate under its own rules. It reflects the
goals and the values of people who make investments in technology. If you have
a society which doesn’t care about the environment, doesn’t care
about the gap between the rich and the poor, and thinks that violence or conflict
is a way to resolve differences of opinion, then you’ll have lots of technological
advance, but that technology will damage the environment, exacerbate the gap
between the rich and the poor, and strengthen the military capacity of a dominant
nation.

So we shouldn’t just step back and say that technology’s going
to get us out of this. What we need to do is come up with a plan, and when we
have it, technology will be very helpful to us.

Puplava: Now what about, for example, something that we’ve seen, and
I guess it’s getting wider recognition now with the prices moving up in
the energy market. But since the early eighties we’ve been running a net
energy deficit. We’ve been consuming more energy, oil and carbon fuels
than we’ve been finding, and also per capita grain production peaked in
the eighties, so we had peak grain production per capita. We also had peak energy.
How serious is that? At least now, at least oil prices on the day you and I
are talking, oil prices closed at $49.90 a barrel.

Meadows: Well you mentioned two problems – food and energy – and
let me take them in turn. The globe currently produces enough food to give everyone
an adequate standard of nutrition. The problem isn’t with the technology;
it’s with the values set. Unfortunately, our values cause us to feed a
lot of that food to the pets of the rich and to leave a lot of poor people (a
couple billion) without enough food to go to bed every night. So it’s
a question of values, not the technology itself. Soils are eroding, ground waters
are being depleted, and agricultural soils are being diverted over to urban
and industrial uses, so the pressures are enormous on the food system.

Our model projected that per capita food production would peak out and start
to go back down around 1990. That seems to have been the experience, although
it’s a little early to tell. And our model suggested that total food production
would peak out around 2020. Food production’s still going up, but the
population is going up even faster, so per capita, it’s going down. If
we don’t address the underlying causes, then it will be extremely serious.
You see, for example, China now beginning to move into the international food
market. And it means that although China gets the grain it needs, prices are
raised, and poorer countries are finding it much more difficult.

Energy is an interrelated issue but quite different in its dynamics. You’re
right, we haven’t at least for a couple of decades discovered as much
fossil fuels each year as we’ve used. So, of course, we’re coming
to a point where the global production is going to peak out and start going
back down again. There’s a fairly informed group of experts who think
that that’s going to happen soon – this year or certainly in this
decade. Once again, it depends on values. We have more than enough energy to
satisfy all of our basic needs, but if our value set says that we ought to run
a lot of it through SUVs for the rich and leave the poor without cooking and
heating, then of course it’s going to generate enormous difficulties.

One of the interesting anomalies for me has been to see that recently, you
know, all of the concern about terrorism has basically categorized people who
take violent action as somehow being against us politically, or jealous of us,
or something like that. There’s really no historical basis for that. What
we know is that when people find their basic needs are not being satisfied and
they have no other alternatives, they turn to violence. So if energy is going
to exacerbate that problem, it’s something of enormous concern also to
us.

Puplava: Do you have a problem, however, with some of the global poverty issues,
which is not just a political problem, but also an economic problem. In other
words, if you take a look at the genocide, the wars in Africa, you know, how
do you solve that kind of issue when you’ve got a political problem occurring
at the same time you don’t have an economic system that can even do anything
to help those people.

Meadows: Let me say, one of the insights we gathered in the course of doing
our work was that even if we have a great model, it doesn’t let you answer
all questions. And, I must say our research doesn’t give us any special
perspectives on issues confronting the really desperately poor nations in Africa.
What I can say is that the market is not going to let people grow their way
out of poverty. We’ve had twenty or thirty years of absolutely historically
unprecedented economic growth. And it has widened the gap between the rich poor,
so it’s really amazing to me that people think somehow sustaining growth
for another couple decades is going to somehow start reducing the gap. It isn’t.
But it requires that we take on poverty as an as an explicit ethical, political
issue, and when we’ve done that, then we can find markets or technologies
or economies that will help us deal with the problem.

Puplava: Moving on to this book now. You released a version earlier, and now
this is the thirty-year update to this book. If, essentially, you’re making
the same points, why another version?

Meadows: Well, we address that issue in the preface to the book, and, in fact,
actually this is the third edition. The first one came out in 1972. The second
one was called Beyond the Limits, published in ’92, and now this one,
well, which just came out.

First of all, we have to look back and say that people didn’t pay attention
in 1972. We said then if current policies are sustained, there’ll be problems.
Looking back, we see that current policies were sustained. There’s been
no interruption to the growth in population, resources use, energy consumption,
and so forth from the 1970s. In 1972 there were 3.65 billion people on the planet.
Now there are over 6 billion. You’ve probably noticed recently in the
papers headlines saying something like that the population has fizzled. Well,
you need to put that in perspective. A while ago, demographers thought that
there were going to be 12 billion people, and now they think there’s only
going to be nine, so they’re claiming that the population bomb has fizzled.
But actually the planet can only support about 2 billion people at the standards
of the West, and we already have six, so I would say the population has exploded.
It was to call attention to that and a number of other issues that we rewrote
this book.

Also, the book has been very widely used in many languages as a textbook, and
the data sets were just getting out of date. In 1992, all of our data tables
stopped in 1990, so one of the main reasons for me, at least, as a teacher was
to put out a new edition which brings all the data up to the year 2000 so that
teachers can continue to use this as a text.

Puplava: Your contention is that the planet that we live in is in overshoot.
What does that mean, exactly?

Meadows: Yeah. Let me say that’s not simply our contention. Although
in 1972 we were crying in the wilderness, now there’s a very wide array
of people who recognize the truth of what we said. Indeed, there’s a widely
used indicator called the human ecological footprint, which compares the demands
on the planet with what the planet can provide. And that indicator, which was
developed totally outside our group, indicates that we’ve moved above
the sustainable levels back about 1980 or so. We’re now about 20% above.
Nobel scientists, looking at individual problems like climate change, species
disappearances, ???., reached the same conclusion.

What it means is that the number of people and the standard of living that
we have adopted put our demands on the planet above levels that can be sustained.
It’s like you had a big bathtub full of water, and you start taking water
out of it. Over the short term, you could do that, irrespective of how much
is running in. But over the long term, you can only take as much water out of
the bathtub as is being regenerated by the faucet. If you take out more than
that you’re technically in overshoot. That’s what we are. In 1972
the problem we faced was to slow population and industrial growth so that they
came to a halt below the level that could be supported. Now we’re way
above it. We need to figure out how to get back down without engendering some
kind of collapse.

This is nothing new. There’ve been many societies in history that have
temporarily overshot their carrying capacity and collapsed. What’s different
today is that global trade, international communication, migration, the international
financial system and so forth have linked all the reasons together so that when
one country or one region goes, it’s felt everywhere.

Puplava: How much of this also is a monetary issue? In other words, if you
have central banks that are, for example, printing a lot of money to expand
or keep the economy afloat and keep this constant growth factor where you get
all these ??? investments. How much does monetary policy have to change? Because
it seems like that is a contributing factor in some of the things that are going
on in the western economies.

Meadows: Over the short term, I think the monetary system is quite important,
particularly if it works in a way that diverts investment away from solving
problems over into the things that really cause problems. A monetary system
which facilitates the purchase of very expensive cars or the build-up of a huge
military system obviously makes it harder for mankind to live peacefully and
adequately on this planet.

But over the long term, I don’t think the monetary system actually has
that much to do with it, because it’s the underlying physical realities
of resource scarcity, limits to pollution, eroding agricultural soils and so
forth that are causing our problems. And if we don’t change the physical
realities, doesn’t make any difference how much money we print. We’re
still going to have problems.

So in our global model we actually omitted money. That’s a model which
works out over 200 years. What I feel models that have behavior over two or
three years, then you have to put money in there, because over that period of
time the monetary system has a major impact.

Puplava: Well let’s talk about in this thesis of overshoot, what are
the three causes, and if you could explain each one, and let’s get into
those.

Meadows: Overshoot is a phenomenon that we all experience almost every day
in our daily life, but at a very much smaller scale. You know, if you’re
driving a car, and on a slippery road and come up to a stop sign and misjudge
how long it’s going to stop, you can overshoot the stop sign. Or if you
step into your shower and turn on the hot water and don’t make adequate
allowances for the length of the pipe, you could overshoot the comfortable temperature
and scald yourself. So we’re just talking about something which occurs
everywhere, but now it’s on a global basis.

And the three underlying causes are, one, a rapid rate of change; two, a limit
of some sort; and three, delays in perceiving the limit. When you have those
three things you’re going to have overshoot. And unfortunately, that’s
what characterizes global, population and industrial growth.

Puplava: Well let’s talk about the first cause, which is exponential
growth, because the one thing that we do know is populations keep growing. When
you wrote this book, I think there were three billion people on the planet.
Today there are six-and-a-half, and by the end of the decade, what—another
billion or a half a billion. We’re starting to feel some of the pressure
with China, most visibly right now in the price of raw materials and energy.

Meadows: Right. Well, as I said, one of the underlying causes of overshoot
is rapid change, and at the global scale that rapid change is caused by exponential
growth in population and industrial output. Exponential growth is an expansion
where things tend to double over a fixed period of time. For example, when you
put money in the bank. And what we illustrate in the book is that where you
have the conditions that give you exponential growth, as we certainly do with
population and industry, the change can become incredibly rapid very quickly.
It fools you, you think you understand what’s going on, and you don’t.
And that’s then what gives cause to the second concern, which is the limits.

Puplava: Well, if we take a look at this change in a lot of exponential growth,
and then versus limits, I want to talk about that, because one of the problems
that you have, and this gets back to a point you make in your book where you
say 20% of the worlds population or countries control 80% of the economy and
GDP. And one of the problems that I see here to all of this is also political
and economic to some extent. For example, if you have a dictatorship in a country,
or a country where you absolute poverty, environmental degradation is not as
important to somebody who’s just looking for water and food to live on
versus, let’s say, a wealthier population that has the means and resources
to do something about it.

Meadows: That’s true. I mean, there is absolutely a political and an
economic aspect to all of these things, but you shouldn’t let that confuse
you or mislead you. And of course, you don’t have to go to poor countries
to find populations that are unwilling to deal with population. The United States,
which is the richest country in the world at the moment, is blithely ignoring
climate change, for example. Simply not dealing with it. Indeed, it’s
making it worse. So it’s not only the economic level; it’s also
a question of psychological values.

Puplava: Let’s talk about the second limiting factor, which is an issue
that is confronting China, for example. A lot of the more populous centers in
China, which are along the seacoast, which have the richest soil for farming,
are now being plowed under, and they’re building concrete structures.
So one of the limits, obviously, is food, land and water. In China, we’re
starting to see this reality. Why don’t you speak about this for a moment.

Meadows: The computer model that we developed generates a variety of different
possible futures. It doesn’t predict the future; you can’t do that,
and we have no way to know which of the different futures might occur. But the
one that shows up first when we run the model is one with food shortages where
global trends in land and water , like the ones you see in China today, finally
make it impossible for the planet to grow enough food. It has enormous consequences,
because when that happens, you will see that a lot of investment pulls out of
human services and industry in trying to prop up the agricultural system. And
then that leads to declining growth rates in the other sectors.

It’s not only in China. Worried most about China just because that’s
a country still rich enough to buy food on the international market, so when
they overstrip their land and water resources, we feel it economically. When
Uganda or Botswana or Ethiopia overstrip their soil and their water resources,
it doesn’t manifest on the international markets, and so we just don’t
notice it.

You mentioned just a minute ago the monetary system. Here’s an interesting
example of how it may operate. Remember I said one of the key factors causing
overshoot is delay, and the monetary system can introduce a very significant
delay. Take the United States, for example. We have actually overstripped our
energy resources in this country, and the way we have been able to ignore that
is by borrowing money and using it to import oil and gas. If the monetary system
didn’t exist, and we had to exist on our own energy resources, then long
ago we would have had to come to terms with our current energy policies. But
because Japan and China and other countries are willing to keep buying federal
bonds, we’ve got a ten or twenty year delay here before we really have
to confront the reality of the fact that we’re really using more resources
than we can generate or can generate the goods for.

Puplava: One issue that I think even though oil is on the front page of the
news every day, another issue I see as very important, which is water. We discussed
it on this program in the past, but here, for example, in the western part of
the United States, we’re in the sixth year of the drought. We’ve
got, I’m trying to think of the name of the major dam in Nevada, which
if the drought and the water levels keep going lower, they’re going to
stop making hydroelectric power.

Meadows: Right.

Puplava: But this is also a global issue, and most people don’t think
of, you know…we just expect, for example, in the west we’re going
to turn on the faucet or take a shower and the water’s going to come on,
and we expect to show up at the gas station and be able to buy a gallon of gasoline.

Meadows: One of the interesting, dynamic features of these problems is that
they can switch very suddenly. You can experience decades of growing use for
some resource—marine fisheries is a good example—and year after
year you’re able to produce more. It seems like there’s no problem,
and then suddenly, almost overnight, the resource collapses and you find yourself
left with nothing.

Water has some of these properties. We’ve grown used in the United States,
particularly in the East, to the notion that there’s abundant water—clean,
pure, relatively inexpensive water. And so we are doing things which, day by
day, diminish our water or degrade it, thinking that this is not going to have
any long-term consequences. But what we’ll see is, almost overnight, we’ll
move into a period of water scarcity. This has happened already in many regions
of the globe, and serious efforts to understand where conflict is arising now
recognize that conflicts over water are more and more important.

Puplava: What can be done about this? For example, the United States was in
a very special situation. We were a large producer of energy. We were endowed
with large energy resources. Much of that has already been consumed, but when
the last energy crisis erupted in the seventies, it turned out to be more of
a political issue. We were able to import our way out of that particular crisis.
But now the United States is now competing for oil with China, which has become
the second largest consumer, but what do you do with water? For example, there
are so many vagaries having to do with weather, you know. We don’t get
a lot of snow, there’s not as much fallout from the water…uh, the
water tables. I mean, how do you handle something like that?

Meadows: Well, I think there are three general policies with respect to water
that you can going on around the world. So first of all, of course, would be
intelligent efforts to reduce water use, to reduce the contamination of water,
and to respect the groundwater supplies so that we don’t overpump them.
Whole set of very rationale measures, and if we undertook these in a deliberate
fashion, they would be relatively inexpensive and they would generate a high
profit. And so there’s a lot of what we might call low-hanging fruit there,
if only we would go looking for it.

The second response, of course, is to import grain. It turns out that importing
grain is one of the easiest ways to import water, because it takes an enormous
amount of water to produce grain. And so when you see China importing grain,
they’re not only importing food; they’re importing water. They’re
offsetting their local water scarcities. And a deliberate effort to import water-intensive
materials can be one way of overcoming the shortage.

And then the third way is, which at least works maybe in the short term, you
simply try to seize territory that’s got water on it or under it. And
you look around for neighbors that are weaker than you are, and then you enter
into treaties with them. If they don’t want to get into treaties, then
you can threaten them with something more serious. So those are the three ways
we now see people trying to deal with water scarcity.

Puplava: Well certainly there’s been a number of issues that have been
written on this. Michael Klare has written a book called Resource Wars. He’s
got a new one called Blood and Oil. If, it seems to me, there’s limits
to growth at the top, it seems that energy and water have to appear right underneath
there because we take a look at, for example, the enormous improvement in agricultural
output. A lot of that has to do the type of fertilizers which are made from,
let’s say, natural gas. And water has contributed to that, so it seems
like if you don’t have energy or if there’s a scarcity of energy,
you can’t plow as many fields. You don’t have the technology or
the resources to get the food output, and it seems like they’re all linked.

Meadows: They are absolutely all linked. Anyone who looks back 500 years from
now on this period of human history will see that this brief bubble of cheap,
relatively abundant energy, which we got initially from coal, then from oil,
and now more recently from natural gas, was what permitted the enormous growth
in industry, ecological progress, and the expansion of the human population.
We now face the very real prospect that we will be so short-sighted and so stupid
in our reliance on technology and the markets that we will not do the things
required to get along in a world which has much less available energy.

Solar energy is relatively abundant—wind energy, photovoltaics and so
forth—but it takes a long time and lots of capital investment to get yourself
over to the point where you could make good use of it. If we wait until the
oil system is rapidly collapsing, we’ll no longer have the discretionary
resources we need to make the adjustment. And then this technological development,
which people have come to think is inevitable over the last hundred years or
so, will be seen to be nothing much more than an artifact of abundant energy.
It’s no mystery why countries which have enormous amounts of oil and gas
can build up their services, their food, their personal consumption, and their
industry much more rapidly than countries that don’t. And the United States
is rapidly moving from being a country that does to one that doesn’t.
Puplava: Has it surprised you, to some extent, that our leaders, and certainly
people…investors have not paid as much attention to what’s going
on with energy and water. I mean, even—it doesn’t matter if you’re
an environmentalist or you’re a capitalist. I mean, a prominent investment
banker, Matthew Simmons, has been talking about this for quite some time as
it relates to energy. And, you know, it doesn’t seem to be on the forefront
and on this year’s presidential election. It’s not given a lot more
press other than the fact that people have noticed that prices have gone up.

Meadows: I don’t know if it’s surprising, but it’s certainly
frustrating and disappointing. I have to say there’s not a nickel’s
worth of difference between Bush and Kerry when it comes to talking about climate
change, energy shortages, and environmental destruction. I think probably the
two candidates do have different views on the matter, but in terms of their
public pronouncements, there’s nothing…nothing to pick there.

Investors are looking for a quick turnaround in their profits. And if your
time arrives, and there’s only a year or two, then energy depletion is
not a particularly interesting matter for you. But those of us who have kids
or grandchildren have, or should have, a somewhat longer incentive. And if you
want to make sure that this planet is an acceptable place for your kids, energy
depletion is enormously important. Thirty years ago this was a distant matter,
but we’re now talking about trends which are going to manifest over the
next five to ten years.

Puplava: Now what about your computer models? You have a computer model called
“World 3.” Why don’t you tell us what it is. What does it
tell us?

Meadows: Our goal back in 1972 was to understand where policies—current
policies—that govern population growth, energy use, food production, capital
investment, and so forth—where they were taking us, globally and over
the longer term. There’s no way to predict the future, but there are some
systematic rules or regularities that you can identify.

And so the team of 12 people that I put together looked at government data,
we talked to experts, we read the literature, and we came up with a list of
probably about 50 general principles that govern the behavior of the industrial
and the population systems. Now these aren’t mysterious. Each one of them,
actually, when you lay it out in writing, seems perfectly obvious. For example,
when people get richer their diets shift. They go from basically being a grain-based
over to being a meat- or dairy-based diet. When people’s income goes up,
their birthrate tends to go down. When you invest more in industry, your productive
capacity goes up. When your productive capacity goes up, you need more energy,
and less technology reduces your consumption requirements.

So we came to a set of about 50 of these principles, and then what we did is
program them—express them mathematically and put them into a computer—and
play the experiments with them. As I said, there’s no way you can predict
the future because obviously even this conversation is going to change the future
slightly, so what we can do, though, is draw out a set of portraits about how
things might evolve and look for common features, and that’s what we did.
And the portraits are scenarios. They’re plots which show possible behavior
for global population, for industry, for food consumption, for pollution generation,
and so forth between 1900 and the year 2100.

The first hundred years gave us a sort of a historical base that we can compare
with real data, and then the next hundred years help us where we might be going.
It’s kind of like a radar on the bridge of a ship. The captain of a ship
knows that it’s going to take a long time to turn or stop his vessel,
so he can’t just look 10 or 15 feet out in front of the ship to know what
he should do. And when it’s cloudy, he has to use the radar to project
out into the future path of the ship far enough to see obstacles, soon enough
that he can change course. That’s exactly what we’re doing with
“World 3.”

Puplava: Now these two scenarios that you’ve come up with, “World
3.” Which one do you believe to be the most probable?

Meadows: Well, people ask me that a lot, and what I think is the most useful
way to respond to that is that professionally I hope for the best, and personally
I prepare for the worst. What we have found is that today it is extremely much
more difficult to get our World 3 model, to generate what we might call sustainable
development. In the 1970s it was quite simple. You could assume relatively low
rates of technological advance, relatively small shifts in personal consumption
patterns and see a desirable future.

Now you need to make really extreme assumptions, because the world’s
population has gotten much bigger, and the resource base has diminished. We
are in overshoot. We are above the levels that can be sustained long-term, even
if you make heroic assumptions about technology. So the question is, how are
we going to get back down? Is it going to be peaceful, equitable, easy? Or is
it going to involve conflict, difficulty and great disparities between the rich
and the poor? Every day that we delay thinking about these issues, the second
outcome becomes more likely.

Puplava: Let me just come back for a moment to technologies, because we’ve
seen some of these Malthusian arguments and problems surface in the past. And
if I want to play devil’s advocate, I might say well, yeah, people were
concerned about this in the seventeenth century. They were concerned about this
in the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century. Here we are today, six-and-a-half
billion people, and we’re still around, and, you know, depending on where
you live, doing okay. What about technology? In other words, when we came to
the end of timber, all of a sudden coal was discovered as a source of energy,
and when the coal age was seen to be coming to an end, we discovered oil in
Titus, Pennsylvania, and the oil age was upon us. What about technology?

Meadows: Well, it’s a useful question, and it needs careful thought.
It is the case that even before Malthus, people looked at the situation and
said, my goodness, we’re going to get ourselves into real trouble here.
And then, in one way or another, the difficulty went away or was finessed. You
know, there’s a famous claim that horses were going to bury New York in
horse manure, and then of course along came the internal combustion car.

So I think it’s useful to look back on those forecasts and understand
where they went wrong or what they ignored. One thing we can say is…I’ve
done that, and what comes out is the following. In the past, the issues that
were being addressed tended to be quite local. Malthus was looking at England
and England’s ability to feed itself, for example. And the problems went
away when the local systems began to draw resources from outside. Actually,
Malthus would have been right if England had had to continue feeding itself,
but through the industrial revolution it began to trade textiles and other manufactured
goods for the food that it needed, so it expanded its agricultural base.

Now we’re dealing with problems which are global in scale. And for the
first time, and this is really recent, last couple of decades. The issues we’re
looking at affect the entire globe. We’re not going to import a new climate
from someplace else. We’re not going to find new oil reserves from someplace
else other than this planet when the current ones start to deplete. So the scale
has increased enormously. Also, the rapid rate of change has increased, so that
we have much less time to deal with these issues.

Let me say, I appreciate technology. I have a Ph.D. from MIT, the leading technology
school in this country, perhaps. But let me point out that now it’s not
just a bunch of luddites who are making this claim. Nobel prizewinners, scientists
of many stripes look at the current trends and say we’re doing permanent
damage to the globe and we have to change.

Technology can be helpful to us in making that change if we get our priorities
straight. But if we just sit back and think that somehow technological advance
is going to make it unnecessary to deal with these issues, it’ll be a
catastrophe.

Puplava: Well given some of these problems that exist and the things that we
need to start planning for, how do we make the transition?

Meadows: I think the most important thing is to recognize that we do need to
make a transition, to realize that it doesn’t work anymore to just project
the old trends onward and upward. A change is coming, and we need to get out
in front and make sure it works to our benefit. That’s the most important
thing.

Then we need to start increasing the time horizon. For a variety of reasons,
politics, the media, and the economic system have shortened down the period
of time that anybody pays attention to when they’re making fundamental
tradeoffs. But meanwhile we’re doing things which have consequences over
decades. So we need to start looking further out again.

This is not rocket science. There are some rather simple institutional changes
that could be made. For example, the United States used to have a Council on
Environmental Quality which looked out at environmental trends. It was disestablished
and shut down. We need to have something like that come back again. Economists
need to quit discounting a future with high interest rates so that they don’t
pay any attention to things three or four years out. And so forth. And voters
need to demand that the people running for office quit promising to solve problems
over the short term without telling what kind of costs are going to be involved
in the long term. There are lots of things like that to be done.

And then I think that we need look at the environment and realize that it doesn’t
somehow exist apart from us. We’re dependent on it. And if we damage this
planet, it’s the only one we’ve got. So, these are, I know kind
of vague, and even, I might say academic prescriptions, but anyone who takes
them seriously can immediately find things to do in their own life that will
make a big difference.

Puplava: Professor, I guess one of the easiest ways to solve the problem is
to recognize that a problem exists, and then you go about seeking solutions.
But one of the…I guess one of the issues I see so often happens…we
saw this here in California, where we got into an energy crunch. We had blackouts
in 2000, and what you typically see is the first thing the politician does is
look for somebody to blame. They don’t want to take responsibility, and
then the media comes on board and they get into he-said, she-said. And the real
relevant issues that should be or should have been discussed in, for example,
California’s energy crisis or, for example, last year when power went
out on the east coast and in the Midwest, is what have we done to mature energy
infrastructure and what are we going to do about it in the future? Instead,
it became a blame game.

Meadows: I don’t see an easy solution for that. I see ??? to the problem.
What I can say is that it’s not going to get solved if each of us just
stand back and wait for somebody else to do something. Each of us has the capacity
to start asking hard questions and not to accept easy answers.

When a lot of smart people keep making the same mistake, as, for example, with
blackouts, I understand that there’s not some one person at fault. There’s
an underlying structural issue that needs to be corrected, and that’s
when you start probing to see what are the features of the system that are causing
this.

Puplava: I guess maybe a couple of final questions, Professor. You know, you
say you plan for the worst but you hope for the best. If there were something
that was to make you more optimistic about the future, what would that be?

Meadows: I think it would be seeing politicians who are running for office
starting to talk about the underlying physical realities, long-term realities
that we face on this planet. Climate change is no longer a scientific uncertainty.
There is adequate scientific evidence that we have changed the climate, and
that we’re in a period of rapidly accelerating climate change. And it
is going to have generally negative consequences. I’d be enthusiastic
if politicians would start to recognize that fact and do something about it.
I’d be more optimistic if politicians would quit pretending that oil was
an infinite resource, which is just going to keep going up and up and up in
its production. By and large, I would be optimistic if people would start looking
at the physical realities instead of the economic, short-term political signals
that, by and large, confuse us and obscure what’s really going on.

Now how to bring that about? I’m not sure. I’m a teacher. I’m
a writer. When I’m working with my students, I help them to see the underlying
realities, and when I write books, I try to point out what’s going on.
That’s what I know to do.

Puplava: And finally, Professor, if there is one thing that you would want
the readers of Limits to Growth to walk away with, what would that point be?

Meadows: The recognition that we’re coming into two decades of radical
transformation. These problems are no longer off in the distant future. In 1972,
we thought that the issues would start to occur about 2010, and we still think
they’re going to occur about 2010, so recognize something’s going
on, and so as the symptoms begin to start cropping up—inflation, high
oil prices, growing conflict. Instead of scapegoating or pointing the finger
at some political party or some individual, realizing that the underlying system
is out of kilter and needs to be brought back into balance by stabilizing population
and drastically changing material consumption needs.

Individuals, once they recognize that, can make some fairly quick, relatively
painless changes in their own lifestyle, and then they can start calling attention
to their children and other people around them to the reality. It wouldn’t
take very much of that to get a real sea change.

You know, it’s easy to become pessimistic about the changes that are
necessary, but our society has in the past couple of decades gone through some
really profound revolutions. Take, for example, smoking. You know, if I told
you 20 or 30 years ago that smoking would be outlawed in public places, you’d
have thought I was crazy. But spontaneously there came in our society a rapid
shift. We used to be in favor of large families. Now we’re in favor of
small families. That’s a really profound shift. We’re talking about
that kind of change, which feeds on itself once it gets started.

Puplava: Well, Professor, I want to thank you for joining us here on “The
Financial Sense News Hour.” Hope some of the messages of this book gets
out, at least to our political leaders, because these issues need to be addressed.
The name of the book is called Limits to Growth: the Thirty-Year Update.